Abstract

The purpose o f this study was to determine the teaching
competency needs of vocational agriculture teachers at the
agricultural college level in order to provide information as
input to programme planning of agricultural education in
Thailand.
Data were gathered from 304 vocational agriculture
teachers and 180 administrators in the 43 agricultural
colleges in Thailand. Two instruments were constructed to
gather the data: (1) an eight item questionnaire regarding the
teachers' and the administrators' personal characteristics
backgrounds; (2) a 76 item inventory of vocational agriculture
teachers' teaching competencies covering five competency areas. Data collected from the inventory were analysed to
determine in - service programme need priorities. The
respondents were requested to rate the competencies on a
five - point Likert - type scale for the level of importance and
attainment. In order to determine need priorities, a need
indicator score was calculated for each item by dividing the
square of the importance rating by the attainment rating.
Finally, for the ratings of importance and attainment, the need
indicator s core was arranged in rank order for both the
respondent groups according to items and competency areas.
Spearman's Coefficient of correlation was used to calculate
the level of agreement be tween the groups' rank order. In
addition, correlational analysis was carried out to determine
the relationships between some selected personal
characteristics of the teachers and their teaching competency
needs.